By: TJ Hartnett

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

They fired their basketball coach and so obviously they needed to find a new one. It was supposed to be Thad Matta.

There was a 5-year, $16 million contract offer made and he was expected to sign it, but on Wednesday he decided not to.

That’s was the first choice. To say that the guy who was hired was a second choice does a disservice to him. Simply, because it only took three hours after Matta’s contract rejection to make an offer to the next guy on the list.

Tom Crean showed up and showed off the kind of infectious enthusiasm he’ll be bringing to the table after he was announced as the new University of Georgia men’s basketball coach this week. He started off on an excited and positive note, leaving just one thing left to do, get ready for the next season of ball.

Exuberance and enthusiasm are good things for first impressions, certainly, but even beyond that I think that Crean is the right man for the job right now. His resume is one that shows a guy who can right a ship and build up a program that needs it.

Look at his successes at Marquette, where he took a rarely successful program and took them to the Final Four in his fourth year. As well as made every post season after. He also took a program that was on probation in Indiana and got them to the Sweet 16.

These aren’t just little schools either. Indiana is Indiana, with five National Championships to their name. Marquette had won the big one as well and both of those schools were in dire straits before Crean turned them around.

In both situations, Crean utilized the progams’ wide reaches and rich pools of resources to return them to glory. UGA is different in that its former glory doesn’t include championships, but it’s about where those two schools were before Crean came aboard and pushed them towards excellence.

It is no small matter that he was the head coach at Indiana. UGA is an SEC school, sure, but the pressures of a basketball coach at Indiana are more akin to what Kirby Smart faces each year than they are to the situation Crean now finds himself in.

He’ll need to produce wins to keep his job but the pressure of being the top dog (no pun intended) of a school’s sports program is off of him. That is likely to be a positive as he inherits the Bulldog’s basketball team.

Hugh Durham and then Mark Fox took a broken program after the 2002 scandal and led them back to winning ways but they were never able to implement consistency and take the next step.

That sporadic success has made UGA fans ravenous for more and more success.

The return of UGA’s football program to an elite level has also raised the expectations of its other programs. UGA is a football school and it will always come first, but success breeds expectation and Crean should be the guy to elevate the basketball program to an equal level of Kirby Smart’s boys.

February and March could merely be a continuation of sports fanaticism, not a just a lull in between the end of a bowl game and G-Day.

Crean can make that happen. He’s already been speaking about his approach and his plans to attack the Greater Atlanta area for recruiting once his staff is in place.

He’s got a history of getting programs past their previous barriers, and he can be expected to do the same thing at UGA.

Not bad for a second choice.